Halt and Catch Fire: Soul in the Machine

This week, the Cardiff Electric prototype wakes up, and drives a wedge between Cameron and Gordon.

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Through its first five episodes, the AMC dramaHalt and Catch Fire has tried to immerse us in the PC wars of the early 1980s and all the technological problems thereof—our heroes dream of building a 15-lb. "portable" computer, after all. But in episode 6, the series shifts into debating questions that drive today's computer science: How deeply can a computer interact with its users, and does it have a soul?

The Cardiff Electric team gathers around as Bosworth (Toby Huss) turns on the prototype. The LCD monitor flashes "Hello World." Success! The operating system works! Next the coders need to program the peripheral drivers—circuits that will allow the PC to communicate with its peripheral devices such as its floppy drive.

But Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) gets another idea while playing Colossal Cave Adventure. "Our computer's going to have a personality," she tells Gordon (Scoot McNairy). "An operating system that asks you questions and you answer it back. You interact. I need an additional 384 K of RAM."

Gordon refuses, saying the prototype is already done. "Operating systems are total pigs," he says. "Even with the added memory, you're going to be stealing from the other operations and slowing the entire machine down."

Cameron takes the issue to Joe (Lee Pace). "It needs a soul," she says. "It needs to be something that people can fall in love with. We can do that. It would be conversational. It would be like speaking to a human being." Joe also rebuffs the idea, saying they need to get the computer to market first and then they could maybe work it into the second gen. Later he tells Gordon that he's seriously considering her revolutionary idea. It is unique. "You know how much real estate that would take?" Gordon says. "I'd have to rethink the entire layout of the board."

Cameron tells her software engineers to work on the OS expansion instead of the peripheral drivers—drivers that Gordon and his team of hardware engineers need to start running tests. Frustrated and convinced his beautiful machine is going to be destroyed, Gordon clashes with Cameron over who's in charge.

But Cameron is incredulous. "Gordon wants to build a computer that will impress all the other people who build computers," she tells Bosworth. "I want to build something for people who never thought they'd want a computer. Who don't know anything about them. I want to build something that makes people fall in love."

While these characters are supposedly speaking to one another in 1983, it's hard not to hear echoes of the 21st century—especially Steve Jobs' 2000s obsession with design that has made so many people who don't know anything about computers fall in love with one. The Cardiff PC is certainly alive (in a beautiful image Gordon dreams that a flower is growing from its circuit board). But where it will fall on the artificial consciousness scale is yet to be seen.